I would reboot the Legion yet again. Just because.

One of these two:

1) Jason Todd stays dead.
2) Spoiler lived through her torture.

Here's my retcon:

Norman Osborn really did die back during The Death of Gwen Stacy. The Green Goblin that's running around right now isn't the Green Goblin at all; he's a delusional shape-shifting android similar to the ones Harry Osborn used to replace the Parkers way back when, whose personality is continually reset by periodic exposure to deranged videotapes Norman left behind for Harry (of the "you're too weak to be my son!" variety, naturally, allowing for great shots of Norman Osborn screaming at a cowed, terrified Norman Osborn). Replacement Robot Goblin finds out the truth, goes insane, attacks Spider-Man, gets itself killed, and tidily reduces the level of goblin-themed influence in Spider-Man's life down to a managable level (there's still a Hobgoblin around someplace, right?) while allowing Doc Ock to reclaim his rightful role as grand high superbad spider-villain.

As icing on the side we can write out Gwen's love children and the whole Clone Saga using, I dunno, magic.

Bruce Wayne's parents are killed in front of him as the story always goes. In the new reality, his family fortune is lost for good and he grows up with a variety of foster parents. Since he can't afford to be a rich playboy flying around the world, he learns all his martial arts skills from the Tae Kwon Do class at the local YMCA and his detective skills from Columbo. He still vows to rid Gotham of crime as a Bat but lacks the money to do more than have a Black/Red 80's Monte Carlo SS (hmmm...) and not much more complicated gear than a baseball bat and a thirst for justice.

I can't coherently answer Greg's question because, after reading Charlie's second answer I went to Wikipedia and read the entries on Spoiler and Black Mask and HOLY GOD, WHAT THE HELL WERE THE BAT-EDITORS THINKING?!?! Jesus, what crap. The writers you hire can aspire to nothing better than endlessly riffing on Alan Moore and Frank Miller and doing the Women in Refrigerators shtick over and over again? I can't believe anybody actually paid money to read this garbage.

I'd second rebooting the Legion, but back to the Silver Age version, and pretend that v4 and onward never happened. In fact, let's kidnap Paul Levitz and force him to write LSH again.

Fu Manchu was a native of K'un L'un, and his Elixir of Life was used as the basis of the Super Soldier and Infinity Formulae. Yellow Claw was a protege of his gone incompetent, and a biography of how Fu Manchu is connected to the secret history of the Marvel Universe would be a springboard for a new Shang-Chi series, based around East Asia.

Brian Braddock is actually the reincarnation of King Arthur, and his armor is actually Excalibur. He reorganises the Knights of Pendragon (first, non-costumed version). Oh, Megan bites it.

Spoiler lives. Spoiler lives. SPOILER LIVES.

I would use Legion of Superheroes #300 as a platform to tidy up and sweep away all the reboots. I would then continue on with legion continuity from that point on. Don't bother explaining Supergirl/Superboy/Daxamite continuity.

#1. The fantasy New York created by the Thulsa Doom amulet in X-Men #whatever it was still exists, and is accessible via a few tricky passages in the mainstream New York. A changeling principle transfers one city's version of a person across the gap when the other's enters. The series follows each pair through adventures, sometimes single issues, sometiems single arcs, some continuing for longer.

#2. Everything done with Shang-Chi in the last 10-15 years or so is shuttled off-screen. A suitably catchily named title tells stories of Freelance Restorations, headed by Clive Reston. Shang-Chi and Leiko Wu show up a couple times a year. Black Jack Tarr is the aging, disabled mentor; Nayland Smith has passed on. Post-Cold War spy weirdness provides some storylines, with a lot of tension between the folks who've given up government spying since the fall of the Soviet Union and '70s veterans like Reston; a Planetary-esque approach to the Marvel universe and a bit of this and that from many genres provide the rest of the stories.

Interesting that we've got a couple of Shang Chi submissions. Strengthens my sense that the Rohmer estate and Marvel need to stop jerking off and get together so we can get the Essential Shang-Chi.

I'm also going to sign onto the Spoiler fix, and echo Chris' incredulity that anyone ever thought this was reasonable.

The whole Ultimate Marvel universe is just a bad dream thought up by a supercomputer in the Avengers Mansion.

I would be fine with Spoiler dying (not really), if it wasn't due to Leslie Thompkins purposefully letting her die to teach Batman a lesson! What hippocratic oath was this formally amazing doctor following? But frankly, I don't need the character to exist at all.

The problem with rebooting or unbooting the Legion is that all of the different versions of the Legion have been good. I don't mean that every Legion comic, or every, what shall I call it, every minor era of Legion comics has been good, but there are lots of comic readers who grew up with the rebooted Legion and think of Tinya Wazzo as Apparition, not Phantom Girl, for instance. I'm sure there are people who got turned on to the Legion with the Waid/Kitson threeboot. Why take these people's Legions away?

How about this. The Legion exists in the future, and we don't know how the future is going to turn out. All DC has to do is recognize that fact, and we can have all the different Legions we like. When Superboy (yeah, we need Superboy for this) travels into the future, we get the original Legion as portrayed up until the end of Levitz's run. When Lar Gand travels into the future, he encounters the Glorithverse Legion. When Bart Allen (and/or Kon-El) travels into the future, he encounters the reboot Legion. And when Supergirl travels into the future, she encounters the threeboot Legion. Why would that not work?

But that isn't the reboot I'd make. Let's see... how about Stephanie Brown coming back as the new Heckler?

I'd bring John Constantine (and the rest of the 'Swamp Thing family' Vertigo characters) firmly back into the DC universe proper.

The Cosmic Rays should have turned Sue Storm invisible once and for all. Oh, the angst! Reed would never shave again.

I think I would put together a storyline that fixes Spoiler,
Leslie Thompkins, and Cassandra Caine. It would somehow involve Batman knowing of the imminent return of Ras Al-Ghul and putting together an undercover team to prevent it.
Everything we've seen that didn't make sense can be explained as being for the benefit of making sure all the covers are maintained and with the assumption that besides the readers there is also someone else always watching that they are trying to fool. The deaths of Spoiler, David Caine and Nissa al-Ghul would have been faked of course. The fight between Robin and Bat-girl would have been playacting.

Count me in as one of the people who would support rebooting the Legion to around #300 of v.2. If you did that and then gave the book a strong writer/artist team, I firmly believe it would generate numbers superior to those of any version of the Legion since.

I'd also like to do something to fix Tony Stark/Iron Man, but that character is so fubarred I don't know that even a retcon or a reboot would wash the metatextual stink off that character now (especially given the way he's been written thus far in Civil War).

Big ditto on ondoing Spoiler's death. That was just needless and gruesome, and all about trying to make Black Mask look badass and kewl (he never has been and never will be) at the expense of an actually interesting character that showed real growth and potential over time (two, actually, since Steph's death pretty much rendered Leslie Thompkins unusable for all time, too).

And yeah, I also agree that Marvel and the Rohmer estate need to kiss and make up or whatever, because I think they'd sell a boatload of Essential Master of Kung-Fu volumes.

Retcon of my own, let's see... Gwen & Norman's kids are more of the Jackal's clones (made by mixing Gwen & Norman's DNA) created just to mess with Spidey again. Also, the Winter Soldier wasn't created from the real Bucky, but the replacement Bucky who hung around with the second and third Captain America (the guys who were formerly the Spirit of '76 and the Patriot, respectively).

That wasn't Captain America they defrosted from that iceberg. It was just the Spirit of '76, who had memory implants and was further brainwashed to believe that he was the real Cap.

The real Cap appears only now, takes one look at the Marvel Universe circa late fall 2007, and *really* isn't happy with the direction America and the world is going.

Never mind organizing a Merrie Marvel Marching Society of rebels against the registration of heroes. This Cap organizes the actual overthrow of the American government.

Okay, I've got my idea now!

We replace the entire DCU (at least the superhero side of it) with the DC Animated Universe. It's not perfect, but it's lightyears better than the "real" thing.

Now if only there was a good animated universe version of the Marvel Universe we could use to replace the comic book one...

Also, the Winter Soldier wasn't created from the real Bucky, but the replacement Bucky who hung around with the second and third Captain America (the guys who were formerly the Spirit of '76 and the Patriot, respectively).

Nice idea, but Fred Davis is still alive and is with the V Battalion or somesuch, so that retcon would need to be much more extensive... Maybe the Winter Soldier's a clone.

On reflection, I agree that v.2 #300 is a perfect jump-off point to reboot because of the very nature of the story: that way you don't have to do away with any of the already-extant reboots, but simply dispel them to another corner of Brainy's probability-viewing machine. I can see a "Cross-Time Caper"-style story, a romp through every Legion era and version, happening, before settling on one "reality" (preferably the original) for the new series.

Rick Flag is dead. Dead. DEAD. DEAD.

Undo every death in Identity Crisis and it's follow-ups. That'd give us back Beetle, Booster, Sue Dibny, Kon-El, Wally (and family), the wizard Shazam and whoever else was sacrificed on the altar of bad ideas.

Hey, I'm all for change, but that doesn't mean you have to get rid of the characters. Put Wally and Linda, Ray and Jean, and Beetle and Booster all on a bus. Take their powers away (cuz that can be undone in 2 seconds) or something. I don't mind having new guys in old suits. (I was one of Kyle's few fans, after all.)

The Winter Soldier has pretty obvious built-in retcon right there in the storyline. Cosmic Cube, people! So obvious, in fact, that I half-think Brubaker put it there because he intended to flip the reset switch from the beginning (whether he's changed his mind by now, I've no idea).

I would make the Silver Surfer to be more in line with Kirby's original idea, a conscious energy lifeform created by Galactus, instead of Stan Lee's version of an altered Norrin Radd. To be specific, I would reveal that Zenn-La was devoured years ago and that a Norrin Radd did visit Galactus' ship which did impress the big G, but didn't save Zenn-La. The Silver Surfer only thought he was Norrin because as he started developing a personality on Earth post FF#50, he unconsciously started referring to his experience with Norrin Radd to help him understand humans and then simply got confused until he thought he was Norrin. How to explain the subsequent appearances of Shallabal and Zenn-La? The Power Cosmic does wonders - although they only exist when the Surfer thinks of them.

Yes, heavily flawed, but why should that stop anyone nowadays?

I'd also reveal that Medusa did not have amnesia when she joined the Frightful Four. She thought the Wizard and others would be able to help the Inhuman Royal Family defeat Maximus, and had no problems being a criminal in the inferior human society. However, once the Frightful Four was defeated, she decided that Reed and family would make better allies and therefore gave them a whole chunk of confusing information. The original story of the FF following Medusa, discovering the Inhumans, and travelling to Attilan really does not make sense. But if Gorgon followed and attacked Medusa merely to make the FF sympathetic to her, and then planted Crystal to lure Johhny Storm, then it is not so strange that the Royal Family then drops the whole "Medusa does not want to go with Gorgon" ploy and explain that Maximus needs to be stopped. Wouldn't affect things that much, but it would give Medusa and the Inhumans more personality.

OK.

1) The easy one: Take the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver back to their original forms. Heck, take the Vision back while we're at it. Their recent (and not so recent) continuity has leeched all interest from the characters for me. Toss in the Inhumans and you have a great dysfunctional family series.

2) I wouldn't mind bringing Barry Allen back to the Flash. At all, at this point. Of course, in the DC universe I think that Sue Dibny's death was a terrible mistake. I can't articulate why, although perhaps it was the sense I got of her in Starman and Justice League.

3) For a long time now I've thought about resurrecting Ulysses Bloodstone. He'd make for a great run as a Lazarus Long kind of character. Of course, the last Hawkman series explored a bit of that territory in a way.

Of course, the patron saint of bad character continuity is Hank Pym. The guy is like a punching bag for bad writers. Can't we reboot him back 30 years and work from there?

Superman discovers that he was brain wahed just like Dr Light. The story is Superman trying to find out who is responsible and to bring them to justice. He is shaken to discover that Ma & Pa Kent are lying to him. They have knowledge of his brainwashing and are keeping it a secret. He eventually learns that he was called Superboy in the 30th century. Confused he travels to the future (with adventures on the way there) to find answers. He eventually discovers that he was adventuring and learning his powers whiile in the 30th century. Saturn Girl had been wiping his memories and sending him back to the 20th century with no knowledge of his Superboy experiences. The Kents and Clark himself were in on the plot and deception but not in an evil way. Saturn Girl explained that they had to protect the timeline. This retcons the real Superboy into the Legion and gives us back Superboy Proper.

Rick Flag is dead. Dead. DEAD. DEAD.

I didn't realise what it was referring to until I read about it in a reference added to the Wikipedia Suicide Squad entry.

This development is so WRONG, and so CHEAP, on so many levels, not least the literary ones. It's also a big "up yours" to one of the best storylines in the original Ostrander/Yale run (which was incredible in itself).

I've lost a lot of respect for Rucka, now.

>>Never mind organizing a Merrie Marvel Marching Society of rebels against the registration of heroes. This Cap organizes the actual overthrow of the American government.

Ooh, nice one, Jess. Not trying to "out-political" the Englehart-scripted Captain America stories from the early 1970s (Spiro Agnew as leader of the Secret Empire, etc.) too much, are you?